TV, voice, and laptops are dead; long live the smartphone

By Cody Willard

When I used to manage the wholesale operations at a CLEC back a decade ago, landline voice was still the single largest market that the telecom companies served. Today? Voice is a joke. It’s meaningless. Hell, AT&T’s worth $120 billion mostly because of the very wireless network that drops more calls than the rookies receivers getting cut from all over the NFL this week.

As a commenter on my blog put it earlier this week: “Smartphones are mainly used for apps, not calls.”

Isn’t this just about the truth, eh? I mean, I can’t hardly remember what it was like to be a stockbroker, when I used to spend 70 hours a week calling people on the phone. Now? Oh, phone calls? Really? Like rotary dial phone calls?

My Android’s visual voicemail is full and I can’t bring myself to check all those voicemails from unrecognized numbers. Yet I know I use my phone today more than I ever used it before. Just not for phone calls. Voice is, as I used to say it would be on these pages about a decade ago, simply another application that runs over the IP networks.

Did you realize that Google has started letting people make phone calls using gmail? For free in the US. I tried it out the other day when I lost my phone somewhere in the house (and since I knew I nobody would be calling me to talk on the phone, I had to call it myself) and it worked like a charm.

Wifi and the iPod Touch’s new ability to not just make voice calls over Wifi, but especially now that people can video chat. Oh man, voice is meaningless. AT&T’s still forcing people like to buy a voice package when they buy the iPhone, but it won’t be like that in even just another year or two.

Here’s another commenter who brings the points home for us:

What makes a smartphone smart is the apps that run on it. Email, telephone, texting, calendar, compass, FaceBook, etc., are all apps. If Rim has only one app, telephone, then how smart can it be? I may as well use my old black landline Bell dial phone ! A smartphone is much more than a email or BBM device. Smartphones are increasingly providing life essential smarts that are required to sustain our daily life today, and allow us to progress tomorrow as requirements arise. Rim having only 7000 smarts is really insignificant compared to Android’s 70000, and grossly inadequate compared to iPhone’s 250000 smarts.

If you’re still looking at your handset as a “phone”, you’re literally missing everything that matters in tech that’s happening today. Your TV comes with social networking now. Your cell phone’s a veritable MiniMacBookPro for your pocket. Your laptop’s now a tablet the size of a few sheet of paper but it does more than the biggest desktop computer did just three years ago. (Insert obvious and lame “Can you hear me now?” joke here.)

It’s a revolution. Apple and Google are running the show. Buy either, buy both. Get in the app game anyway you can.

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About The Cody Word

Cody Willard writes the Revolution Investing investment newsletter for MarketWatch and posts the trades from his personal account at TradingWithCody.com He is the founder of WallStreetAll-Stars.com and the principal of CL Willard Capital. Cody serves as an adjunct professor at Seton Hall University and is on the University of New Mexico Alumni Board. He was an anchor on the Fox Business Network, where he was the co-host of the long-time #1-rated show on the network, Fox Business Happy Hour. Cody, a former hedge fund manager, and his stock picks and economic outlooks have been featured on NBC’s The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, ABC’s 20/20, CBS Evening News, CNBC’s SquawkBox, Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show, as well as in the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and many other outlets.